Reality
by Farla
Summary: What if pokemon became real? What would you do?
1. subReality: Dreaming

Note: The following is a story where Pokemon becomes real. The main character is an author avatar. There will be repeated references to stories the author wrote, things the author likes and personal views of the author. The main character will possess things the author created previously, many of which are sickeningly overpowered or unnecessary, often both. The main character may also be able to do that annoying thing where they use author knowledge to predict events in the story, it hasn't been decided yet.

You may feel free to complain about any of the previous should you continue on (indeed, I beg of you to do so). I just didn't want to inflict this on anyone unawares.

I am also accepting character submissions for this story. Please see my profile for more details.

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subReality: Dreaming

-

Alison sighed, shrugging off her bag and flopping down in the living room's oversized brown armchair as the door swung shut behind her. She heard a faint sound, like a cloth ball rolling down the wooden stairs. Moments later, her attention was attracted downward to where her cat was staring up at her with wide, imploring eyes, purring faintly against her leg.

"You've got food, Teddy," she told him by habit. She hadn't actually seen his bowls since coming inside. He didn't move. With another sigh she pushed herself back out of the chair.

Teddy ran ahead hopefully, paws silent now on the mottled rug. He paused several times, waiting until she came close enough to stumble on him before continuing. At his bowls, he looked back at her from over his shoulder.

"I get it," she told him, opening a can and dumping the whole thing into the bowl to avoid getting a spoon. He purred loudly and began lapping at the gravy.

"You need to eat your dry food," she said, looking at the untouched second bowl. "Your teeth are bad enough." She resolved momentarily to make more of an effort to feed him the dry food, only to think that maybe he didn't eat it because his teeth hurt. Or that maybe the dry food would just do more damage at this point. She could never decide things like that, so they nagged at her each time they came up.

She dropped the chain of thought, another thing she did each time it came up, retrieving her gameboy from the table as she headed back to the chair. The gold cartridge was already in it. She flicked it on and settled down, curling her legs up under her.

She smiled slightly as the screen came up, informing her of her time and pokedex completion. Gold was her favorite game. Everything she'd done was saved there, all the pokemon she'd raised, items she'd collected, places she'd explored. She could lose herself in it. She didn't want to think about school. She didn't want to think about anything.

Her sprite appeared. She was in Goldenrod, where she'd been hatching eggs. She started to walk towards the center, intending to switch them out for a team of pokemon she'd already raised and then to head for the Elite Four or Red again.

The screen paused as a text box appeared.

…

Great, she thought, another phone call. She didn't like that about the second generation, the static phone system where everyone just repeated the same thing and nothing ever changed. She didn't want to hear that a trainer had almost caught a pokemon for the thousandth time, or that they really thought they were getting stronger just like they always did. She didn't want to be reminded it was just a game and the dialogue, like the rest of it, was meaningless and canned.

If there was one thing she wished was different about the games, it would be for them to be more interactive, expansive. She remembered talking to a friend back in fifth grade not long after she had gotten the game, complaining almost sadly about how she had mewtwo and articuno and moltres and zapdos all on her team and she could fight people with them, but no one ever thought it was strange, and Prof. Oak never wanted to see them, or any of it. Everything was always the same. She wanted it to be different somehow, something new.

But that wasn't possible. She hit A, trying to get through the call as quickly as possible so she could continue on. But then nothing seemed to happen. Impatient, she mashed the A button repeatedly, and only seemed to switch to another ellipsis.

She waited, irrationally irritated. The text changed again. Prof. Elm's name appeared in the box, then his dialogue.

_FARLA, could you come to the lab? It's important._

What? She was sure Prof. Elm never called after the game was finished. Was this a glitch? Her fingers tightened around the gameboy, one pressing against the off switch. She didn't want anything to happen to her game.

After a moment, she decided to keep playing. She'd never used her gameshark on Gold, so this wasn't anything she'd done. And if the code hadn't been messed with, then…she hoped nothing would go wrong, at least. She didn't know what she'd do if something happened to Gold.

Maybe it was nothing, a one-time fluke sort of thing. The one pokemon on the team was her fearow. She selected it and chose FLY, then New Bark Town. After a short animation, she landed in front of 'her' house.

Feeling slightly nervous, somewhat curious, and reminding herself that probably nothing would happen and this would just be a waste of time, she aimed the sprite left and into Prof. Elm's lab.

An exclamation mark appeared over the assistant's head as she entered. The Farla sprite froze in place. Alison felt frozen as well, although she couldn't say if it was worry or anticipation. She had wanted to see something new in the game, but glitches…she didn't want everything she'd done to be deleted. She remembered how it had felt when her scizor had been deleted in a trading glitch. And that for all of her pokemon…no. Yet so far things seemed fine. And she had wanted to see something new.

The assistant rushed over. _Come with me_, he said. Or she, Alison was never sure of their gender. The two sprites headed up towards Elm. I was already going that way, Alison thought sourly as she often did when caught in one of the fixed paths.

The sprite was dropped off in front of Elm. A text box appeared, the letters glitched. Alison hit A and new words appeared. _FARLA received MYSTERY EGG_ it said.

…the hell? she thought to herself, feeling oddly disappointed. She reminded herself that it wasn't like anything else could have happened – it was just a game, it could only do what had already been programmed. Hitting START she went to check if she'd actually gotten the egg and didn't see it. Huh. Oh well. She left the lab and then went to her pokemon team to FLY to Mt. Silver.

The egg was there, filling up the fifth spot on her team. It was still called MYSTERY EGG. That was weird. She exited the menu and took a step. Her sprite was stopped. Another text box appeared. _Huh?_ it asked. She agreed. Was the egg hatching? The third generation addition of bad eggs flashed into her mind suddenly, but she reminded herself that wasn't in Gold and the only what was programmed in could happen. She pressed A and the screen changed to the hatching animation. She watched the egg rock, cracks appear and grow in the shell, break apart –

The screen froze. She hit A a few more times without effect. Then the screen flashed, turned off, and turned on again. She skipped through the opening to see

_New Game  
Options_

Her heart in her throat, she flicked the gameboy back off, then on again. This time the continue option had reappeared. She sighed again, this time in relief. It was ridiculous to care so much about a silly game, she thought, but all the same, she did.

-

Later, in the darkness, Alison found herself awake suddenly, tears in her eyes. She had been dreaming. In her dream, there had been another world, or perhaps just another part of the world, like the fairy kingdoms underneath hills. When you were there, anything you wanted could be found, everything could happen. She had found it once, when she was younger, but she had left and forgotten and when she remembered she couldn't find the way back. When you were there, anything you wanted could be found, everything could happen, but when you left you left for the old world where there wasn't any magic to make things right and once things were lost they stayed lost.


	2. SURreality: Waking

SURreality: Waking

-

Alison's eyes half opened. Still mostly asleep, she gazed at her room through her lashes, everything blurred and hazy. The floor and walls were faintly golden in the morning light. On the rug in the center she could see a pile of pokeballs.

I'm still dreaming, she thought fuzzily, closing her eyelids again. Behind them, the pokeballs strengthened for a moment, but then faded, like an afterimage. She kept her eyes shut a moment longer, but when it remained stubbornly dark, she sighed and opened her eyes.

The pokeballs were there again.

She sat up, staring at them for a few moments, but they were still there. She smiled. So she was dreaming. Dreams where reality and fantasy blurred were nothing new to her, especially when she didn't get enough sleep, and she'd dreamed of waking many times before.

Waking. For a moment she wondered if she'd be woken soon, if she had school, but before she could finish the thought she remembered instead that dreams took place in instants and so she didn't need to worry inside the dream about waking.

The pokeballs, then. She started to kneel down by the pile, then stood to get socks. The air was cold, and so was the wood of the floor. With those on, she kneeled again to look at them.

There were a lot of them. She couldn't guess how many – she'd always been bad at estimating jelly beans or candy corn in jars. But there were a lot. Were they hers? She hadn't – she couldn't have trained this many. At lot of them were red and white, but there were also the dark purples of masterballs, the black and yellow of ultraballs, a scattering of white balls with pink rims. There were probably others, fastballs and greatballs and timerballs and all of those, but so few of them they probably weren't visible. And there was something else, odd pokeballs that she couldn't quite see…

Odd. Suddenly they were just normal, and Alison wondered if she'd imagined it a moment ago. She reached out and picked one up. It was white with a grey band around the middle, like a colorless premierball. She wondered what they were. She didn't know what a lot of the specialty pokeballs looked like.

She heard something move softly behind her, then touch her side. "Hey Teddy," she said, reaching back to pet him. Her hand met something huge and she jerked, turning towards it and dropping the odd pokeball.

The huge cat behind her pulled back as well, startled by her, and she only had a moment to register that before she heard the sound of a pokeball opening, just like that on TV, and she turned back.

Alison had never much liked horses. They were all right in concept – the noble stallion, running across a wind-swept field, this was all well and good. But she didn't much like the animal itself. Horses looked okay in stylized drawings viewed from one side or another. They looked really, horribly wrong when faced head-on. (She thought that perhaps this was why things like kelpies were always depicted facing forward, while majestic unicorns got sideways treatment) The eyes on either side, the narrow long face…the only other animal they brought to mind was a preying mantis, and she didn't honestly believe those were real animals either.

She stared at the ponyta for an indeterminable time. It stared back. She suddenly realized that its body was the wrong color, not white like it was supposed to be, and then she looked down, found the open pokeball, and reached for it. The ponyta snorted, backing up into the wall. Alison fumbled a moment as the ponyta let out a sound almost like a screech, but managed to press the center button. The pokemon disappeared in mid-rear, and Alison sat back on her bed, staring at it.

Alison realized she could hear a low growling sound and she turned to the cat again. "Hey Teddy," she said again, reaching out to pet him on his too-large head. "You were sleeping on the sheepskin, huh?" She must not have noticed him when she woke up. She looked suddenly to the floor by the foot of her bed, and for some reason she found it a relief that the sheepskin was still yellow, not white and pink. She reached out to rub it in with one hand, then looked back to the pokeball.

What was she supposed to do now? What was she -?

She laughed. She was dreaming, she was in Neverland, she could do whatever she pleased.

So then. She headed downstairs, found her backpack where she'd dropped it. She opened the top and turned it upside down, shaking it hard once to knock everything out.

Her bag would do, she thought. It had been overkill to buy it at the time, something that had bothered her. It was meant for backpacking and hiking and being stuffed until it bulged. She'd gotten it only after three backpacks had torn open in a week, the cheap plastic unable to stand up to a textbook. There were no school backpacks that were better so she'd gone to a camping store for the only alternative.

Camping, camping. That would be a problem – no, she corrected herself, because this wasn't real.

She scooped the pokeballs up with both hands and shoveled them into the second-largest pocket in the bag. For some reason, they didn't open as they knocked together, and when she realized the possibility herself after a few iterations, she thought that if it was going to happen it would have, so she continued as she had been.

When she was done she looked to Teddy again. "What about you?" she asked.

He looked at her placidly. He was big, like a persian – she wasn't quite sure how big they were exactly, so he might have been bigger or smaller – but he didn't have a red gem in his forehead, or the thick whiskers, and the structure of his face still looked like him, not a persian. He had tufts of fur at the tips of his ears and the black patches he'd had before on his shoulder, forehead and paws. So was he still just a cat?

Well, it was just a dream. She could decide later. She 'tnsk'ed to get his attention, pulling her tongue from the roof of her mouth to produce the sound. On a whim, she picked up the sheepskin and put it in her bag, then started downstairs again.

As he ambled out of her room she went to the basement, retrieving her sleeping bag and the stacked camping pot set that had never been used, as well as a couple of canteens. Teddy stood at the top of the stairs, looking at her, and she hurried back up.

The sleeping bag could be fastened to the outside of the backpack with the straps. She filled the canteens, attached them to the outside as well, and put the pots inside. Food…she wasn't sure what to do about food. She took the box of sugary trail mix bars, a container of beef jerky, the bag of sugar-coated blueberries, and, thinking of how sick she'd get from all the sugar, a box of cereal. She knew her choices weren't exactly right, but she didn't know what else to pick. She figured it'd be okay for the moment. She could buy some once she left. And she picked up a box of cat food for Teddy.

And she walked out, holding the door open a moment for Teddy.

She knew what was on the left – more houses, and then the school, and then simply more of the same. To the right was a store, but beyond that she didn't know. That seemed like a good place to start her journey.

The road at the bottom of the hill was a main one. When she got there, she realized that there were no cars, and that there had been no cars on the road by her house during the walk down. She didn't have any trouble crossing, and for the first time she could remember, she wasn't scared as Teddy trotted behind her at his own unhurried pace.

The parking lot was empty, something she'd never seen before. She walked across it to the store. The lights were on and the doors opened at her approach, but there was still no one there.

But she was dreaming, and so she wasn't scared by this. Instead she entered and began to wander the aisles. Her bag still felt strangely light. She pulled out the food she'd gotten before and dropped it on the ground, then began pulling food off of the shelves and dropping it into her bag. Nuts, dried fruit and meat, instant noodle cups, gummi bears. She broke open a bag of jolly ranchers to pick out the lemon ones – she loved those but couldn't stand any of the other flavors. She unwrapped on and popped the hard candy into her mouth, enjoying the sudden rush of sweet flavor. She sucked on it as she walked.

The milk was still cold. So was the meat. She picked up a packaged steak and ripped off the thin plastic coating with her nails, then threw it to Teddy. He sniffed it, looked at her as if to see if she'd give him anything else, then, purring, began to lick at it.

She heard clicking sounds as she approached the fish section. Looking over the counter she saw a mass of krabby and corphish scuttling behind the counter, some still bearing the remnants of rubber bands. The lobster tank behind them was empty, the glass sides broken. And she started to laugh again, with a sense of such relief tears formed in her eyes.

Alison piled boxes of kosher potato mix on the other side until they could climb out. She thought they would probably have been okay, but she wasn't sure and didn't want to just leave. They scattered off into the store. Teddy didn't make any move to follow, something she was glad off. She wasn't quite sure what would happen if he attacked any of them.

The fish on display were still fish. Alison wasn't quite sure what that meant. She considered offering Teddy the salmon, but she didn't know if he'd be okay eating the bones. She picked up a container of precooked shrimp, exorbitantly priced, found a bottle of cocktail sauce in a nearby rack and sat down on the tile to eat with Teddy. This might be the last time she'd ever see shrimp, she thought, and wondered if they would turn into anything, like the lobsters, or if they'd just vanish.

The deli was like the rest of the store, unstaffed and fully stocked. Teddy mrowed, and she gave him one of the shrink-wrapped hunks of roast beef. The company logo on it, a pig's head, looked a little like a grumpig, Alison thought, if you looked at it sideways. Grumpig beef. She picked up one of the other pieces of meat and dropped that into her bag as well. She didn't know why – it'd just spoil – but so much else had changed, so maybe not. Teddy rubbed against her legs, the roast beef abandoned half-eaten on the ground, and she piled more into her bag and left.

If she was dreaming, she wanted to see what else there was.


	3. SURreality: Walking

Note: Submitted characters will not be entering this story in the standard _"Hi, I'm (blank)," the description of individual said shortly before joining the party _style. Rather, they will wander in and out of multiple chapters with varying importance, and may appear several times before being formally introduced. That said, Tanya belongs to Rashi.

* * *

SURreality: Walking

-

Behind the building was, impossibly, grass.

She had not been there before, but she knew what it must have looked like. Concrete and concrete and metal poles growing from the ground, metal girders visible where the ground cracked, the false roots of the false plants. Black asphalt for ground that baked shimmering in the sun so that the air tasted of oil and made her think of tar pits. And in small places exposed dirt, dull and brown and lifeless, like cuts in a corpse.

She saw none of this. She saw bright green grass that stretched out to the horizon.

She didn't look back. She knew useless things, stories of people who vanished when you looked away, gateways that sank back into the hillsides, the kind of things that never mattered. So without looking back, she stepped onto the grass and began walking.

And it was grass, so soft and thick it was not even like walking on a carpet but a cushion. She couldn't see a place where any one clump could be distinguished, couldn't feel the irregularity she was used to, couldn't see different shades or heights or sizes. Everything was a bright, perfect green.

She didn't know how long she walked. But she found the ground under her feet grew slowly different, the grass fading away imperceptibly until she could make out something like a path, long overgrown. And it faded further until it was a path, a rich brown, stretching ahead of her until it vanished into the distant green.

And she walked.

She realized the grass had changed at some point, although she couldn't tell how. It was faintly more varied. Sequels, numbers two and three and four, upgrading the graphics from single color blocks to things with patterns, textures. And the patterns grew more complex until you couldn't see the pattern. The grass. It was absurd but she was only dreaming, and she laughed.

Teddy looked at her when she did that, and she only laughed again, and kept walking.

She noticed something dark green in the distance, a faint irregularity on the horizon that pushed ever so slightly into the sky. How long had that been there? She wondered for a moment at the difference between when something happened and when it was noticed, something as indistinct and unknowable as the exact place the blue of the sky became the green of the earth.

She knew it was a forest. She had seen mountains in the distance back before, covered in the same rich color, had sometimes seen them close enough to see the tops of tiny tall pines that looked like strands of a feather. And it became a forest as she walked, growing as she approached it until the individual trees finally became visible, until the difference between large branches became visible, until she was standing at the edge of it.

For a moment she stared at it, the slim friendly trees she remembered from when she was younger, and behind them bigger, older trees, with the low branches she'd never seen outside of someone's yard. And then she stepped inside.

It was dark for a moment until her eyes adjusted. The ground was rich and dark, like the unused path that had been behind the old apartment when she was younger. She was so disbelieving that she had to stop and reach down to touch it. It was nothing like the hiking trails she'd seen, where the dirt had been worn away until it was nothing but stones and scarred tree roots, all that was left after the constant pointless pilgrimages across them.

She smiled suddenly and started walking again.

It was quiet, she realized, after an interminable time. It had been quiet the whole time. Teddy didn't seem to mind, walking freely ahead or behind her. He should know better than her – but, she thought, he didn't really think. There wasn't birdsong in a parking lot; he might think of it the same. If other cats thought they could escape rain by leaving out a different door, he could certainly not understand forest-specific strangeness. How could she know?

And really, she thought, she wasn't any different. She had the idea something might be odd, but she didn't feel uneasy. Too much time in the parking lot.

Although not being uneasy wasn't bad. She was going through the forest one way or another, so she might as well go through it able to enjoy the sights. And they really were impressive sights. The green was dark enough to fall into, the sunlight where it reached the ground thin sheets of translucent gold. Moss filled the gaps between the few short blades of soft emerald grass, the thick mat sending up small reddish stalks, a dust of color over the different shades of green. She had never seen a forest like this.

"What do you think, Teddy?" she said, and smiled when he looked at her over his left shoulder.

And suddenly she saw Teddy's ears prick up, and then, listening, heard something ahead of her, scuffing on the dirt of the path.

What did it say about her that her first thought was to jump off the path, crouch against the ground behind the thick leaves, avoid whoever was coming? But although she tensed for a second, as if to, she thought that she should see what else was there.

After another moment, cautiously, she started to walk again. She passed Teddy, who was holding still and listening. She didn't wonder if she should emulate him. She had seen him do with before when he heard something new, and didn't think anything of it.

She moved beyond one of the path's curves and saw a short ways ahead of herself a small thing, about the size of a cat. Before cats became the size of cougars.

It was purple. She reflected momentarily that it was not a rat, regardless of the name. What had it been? A squirrel? Were all the pokemon former animals – no, she thought, visions of ancient serpents flickering through her mind, that would be too horrible. There were so few left now, there wouldn't be enough. The sense of loss swelled up in her chest. It couldn't be, and she closed her eyes a moment, shook her head, forcing the thought away.

It chittered at her from the ground, the sounds high-pitched and fast but unmistakably ra-ta. She felt disconnected, an observer wrapped in a clear plastic bubble. She bent slightly over it to get a better look, and it repeated itself more loudly, making no move to run.

The traditional? she thought absently to herself. In the first game, the first of it all, the pokemon never ran, never wandered by calmly. They only attacked.

Perhaps she was reading too much into this, she thought. Maybe they were all mixed at it was only coincidence this was the only she met, or maybe she had it all wrong, this wasn't like the game at all.

She wondered what she was supposed to do. Could she just walk away or was she supposed to take the 'run away' command literally? Suddenly remembering, she looked back to Teddy. How could she run with him?

He had crouched down unmistakably, and jumped.

"No wait, Teddy, don't!" she shouted, rushing into his path. His head thudded into her side and she whispered, "Sorry," as he looked at her in bafflement . And when she turned to see what the rattata was doing it was gone.

She thought this was lucky until she thought again of mirages and miracles that disappeared when you look away, and for a moment she was scared of closing her eyes. But she shook her head again, rubbed Teddy's neck and murmured pointless apologies, and started walking again.

Alison came at last to the edge of the forest, one hand resting against the rough bark of a birch a moment as she paused. There had been an incline and she'd used the smaller trees, the half-saplings, to keep her balance on the way down.

Now that she had gotten there, she stared out and across the grass. In front of her she saw buildings.

How…? she wondered momentarily, then stepped from the shade to the light and walked towards them.

She realized almost immediately that the place she had found was bizarre. The first building looked like a tall warehouse, with three rows of high windows. There was no door. She circled it quizzically a second time, then moved on. The next had a door, but although there was clearly a second story from the outside, the inside was a single empty floor, with nothing that suggested how she could get up. She headed out again, staring at the windows of the second story. She felt like going back inside, thinking she had missed something even though she knew she hadn't.

Then she heard voices.

She spun, looking for the source. A door further up the street was flung open and two girls ran out, laughing.

"Then let's try it!" screamed one, her voice carrying on the wind to Alison, the sound strange with all of the subtler inflections stripped out. As she approached she saw their faces. The both of them had almost drugged expressions, bright eyes and an exaggerated nearly clumsy way of moving. They looked like exhausted, hyperactive toddlers. Alison skirted around them, one hand resting on Teddy's back, as, laughing so hard they shook, they threw out their pokeballs.

Inside was a large room, filled with couches and plush chairs and tables, sitting atop a rich carpet. And it was filled with other people.

Other girls, Alison realized after she returned, having made her way quickly through towards the door marked 'Rooms' and depositing Teddy in an empty one before anything could happen. And they all looked impossible in a third way, not too perfect and similar like the field and forest or incomplete like the buildings, but impossible all the same, figures colored with bright splashes of paint straight from the tubes. The denizens of a dreamworld.

They didn't look out of place in the room either, which struck her as comfortably opulent. She headed towards a wall out of the main bustle, touching the wallpaper a moment to see if it was indeed textured, and finding it was, settled into one of the large overstuffed chairs. She closed her eyes an instant, feeling slightly tired.

"Okay," Alison heard a girl say. She looked up. A girl was staring at her. Her eyes were bright violet, a light shade. That couldn't be right, Alison thought, and when she looked again the girl's eyes were a dark indigo color, with a hint of deep purple. "So what exactly are _you_ supposed to be?"

"Oh, I'm –" Alison started to respond, then stopped. "Supposed to be? I don't understand you."

"Your hair is _brown_," the girl said, as if it were obvious. She bent slightly to look closer. "And your eyes are too. What's up with that? Who the hell are you? The only time anyone ment – " The girl stopped, looking as if something had dawned on her. She harrumphed with irritation, almost a playacted sort, and turned on her heel sharply, muttering, "Filler."

Alison hadn't much wanted to talk either. She settled back in her seat again and looked around. There was food in one of the corners, buffet-style and as unmanned as the supermarket she had stood in however long ago it was. Had there been people here? She wondered if it was like the supermarket, emptied, but the incompleteness of the town made her think otherwise. This place didn't feel like it had ever been used.

The girl who had talked to her suddenly shrieked.

"Tanya, Tanya, what's wrong?" asked another girl with hair as red as if it had been drawn with a marker. "What is it?"

"They keep changing back and forth! They keep turning dark!" She sounded hysterical, ridiculously so. She was staring into a small, palm-sized mirror. "They keep changing!"

Alison returned her attention to the buffet. Some of the other girls were piling things onto their plates, others resting dishes on the table by their chairs. She realized she felt hungry and headed over.

The food, absurdly, was Chinese.


	4. SURreality: Wandering

SURreality: Wandering

When she finished eating she decided to explore more of the town. She considered leaving Teddy but then thought she'd rather have him with her than wonder if she could head back. No one else bothered her on the way to the door.

Outside, Alison saw the girls from earlier had disappeared. She wondered which of them had won. She wondered if they had simply vanished when she went inside and ceased watching. There wasn't anyone else around, which wasn't too odd – the other girls seemed to be grouping inside the building, at least for the moment. She could understand that – grouping together was the first thing people would do.

Supplies. This town, or collection of buildings (well, that was town, wasn't it, in the game?) had food and rooms. It must have supplies as well. Every town had a 'mart. She headed along the street, which was not a street but more of an extended sidewalk with nothing to be beside, passing two buildings with no doors, turned a corner, and saw a promising building before her. It had a full glass door and large windows, making her think of a convenience store. Momentarily she reflected that the ones in the games should look different, but squashed the thought as inconvenient. If she complained about something like that, she'd just wind up having to look for another store. With this in mind she broke into a light jog, cutting the time to get there by seconds.

The door didn't open as she slowed down and stopped in front of it. Either it wasn't automatic or it simply wasn't working. It was a bit hard to push open, so she couldn't rule the latter out.

(It occurred to her suddenly that she shouldn't rule anything out. It occurred to her just as suddenly that she shouldn't even be trying to figure out possibilities, because in dreams you must never wonder at the answer. It only overwrites the original answer and becomes the truth and the reality is forever unknown.)

Inside was a counter boxing in one corner of the room. There was no way to walk in behind the counter. There was no one behind it.

Like the store before, the lights were on and the shelves stocked. They looked untouched, as if none of the others had entered. Or perhaps the shelves were permanently stocked, regenerating for each newcomer.

Or perhaps she'd just forgotten to think of it before looking.

There were pokeballs stacked on the shelves, arranged on orange-large resting depressions like eggs. Her imagination was so derivative, she thought, that's just how they're seen on the show. Other people wrote about them being in packages or had them minimized. Why wouldn't they be kept minimized anyway, it would save space.

It didn't matter. She had enough pokemon. More than enough.

In much the same way she found there were rows upon rows of purple potions stacked on the other side of the pokeball shelves. They were unlabeled.

"Will my items be there?" she said to herself. She hadn't checked a computer.

After a second, she realized she didn't usually carry healing items anyway, so it was a moot point, and she swept off a shelf into her bag. There weren't any other items.

She moved on to the next aisle and blinked once in surprise. It looked like a normal store. Bags which looked like the large-size cat food ones piled atop one another, sides pressed together irregularly, not neatly aligned and spaced like the potions. They were blank, without writing or pictures, but when she picked one up it _felt_ the same as the ones she'd picked up a hundred times before. She put it in her bag – well, why not? It wasn't like there was anyone to stop here. She refrained from opening one. She didn't want to change her luck.

She walked out, clicking her tongue to make Teddy follow. Beyond the store lay grass again, and although she hadn't worried before she felt relief to see this.

She looked back the way she had come (but things can vanish as you look away as the angle of the sun changes as the dreams twists to a new idea) but did not go back, and walked out of the patch of wrong buildings back onto the forested plains.

And she walked. Things seemed – real, suddenly, as if she'd badgered things into a more sensible state. There was still a sense of perfection and endless green, but the grass was mixed with clover and round-leaved plants she'd never learned the names of, and the edges of the dirt path were no longer so exact. Small dots of color poked between the grass, small light blue flowers, a cluster of smaller pink ones. She smiled to see them. A ways off was another forest.

She saw a boy appear at the edge of the forest a little ways off as she approached. He must have noticed her too, because he ran towards her.

"Hey!" he said when he up to her. "I thought so. You're like me, aren't you?"

She hadn't been thinking about that, so it took her a moment. She scrutinized him. He looked fourteen or fifteen, with a loud green shirt and duller pants that looked somewhat like jeans but might not have been. He didn't look like anyone she'd seen, she realized. "You're…a pokemon player?" she asked finally. "From before?"

"Yeah. Cool, the only trainers I've seen so far were obvious game ones – bunch of bug catchers and youngsters. I didn't wanna waste time in a boring battle with those guys. Let's fight!"

"Um, what?" She was carrying pokeballs, but she'd been preoccupied by other things. She hadn't thought about having pokemon battles with the people she met. Game canon, she started to think, her thoughts going off on a tangent. It was like that in the games, practically everyone you met outside of cities –

"You don't look like you'll be too strong if you've got a regular pokemon like a persian on your team…but you'll still be more interesting than fighting one of those boring AI trainers, I could've fought them anytime on Stadium without pokemon being real." He tossed a sphere she recognized suddenly as the purplish color of a masterball. "GO, Moltres!" he screamed exuberantly.

A shockwave of searing heat hit her and she dropped flat against the ground, eyes shut. Above her she heard a shrieking cry, and she could feel the wet warmth of the grass steaming under her, while her back baked.

Her eyes opened a crack, and her head was turned so she could see the boy. He had fallen back somewhat so he was sitting on the ground. His face was a pasty white and he looked horrorstruck.

There was a second burst of heat, even worse than before. Her eyes shut again, dry and painful, and she heard the moltres screech again. When she opened them again she saw a blackened circle the size of a large car where the boy had been standing. The meadow was quiet again. Weird, she thought distantly, how she'd only noticed how unnaturally quiet everything was normally after the moltres' angry screams. Cautiously she got up and looked around, seeing the moltres in the sky flying away to the west. There was no sign of the boy who had challenged her.

"I guess I should keep my masterballs shut then," she said thoughtfully, glancing automatically at the straps across her chest from the backpack she carried. She touched them meditatively and considered taking her bag off there and sorting through the pokeballs she carried, but decided against it.

"Come on Teddy," she said to the persian, who was standing up cautiously. "Let's keep going."


	5. SURreality: Deciding

Later, as she kept thinking back to what happened, she realized it might be important. It was the first sign of things not happening like they were expected.

Like who expected? She? Or the boy?

Obviously he'd had goals different than hers, but she'd considered characterization in dreams other times. Often. He was a gameplayer from before, but that didn't mean he was from before.

She grew bored of the tangent and moved back to the next line of thought.

So the pokemon were autonomous – or could be. She was reminded of the joke about the economist, logician and mathematician describing cows. Although who was she supposed to use? In those jokes it was always the engineer with the practical view, and there wasn't one in that joke. What she knew, then: one pokemon of one boy once did something she thought was autonomous.

But saying it was unique was at least as foolish as generalizing completely. It was the first and only pokemon he let out, and he was the first boy she'd met who tried to do such. The odds of something unlikely happening...although the odds had always struck her as skewed in the game, following the pattern more like coin flips rather than truly being random.

Seven canons, she thought then. Game, show, mangas. Card game. She'd been thinking in terms of the game.

She thought back to the white and gray pokeballs in her bag, the black ponyta. Eight canons.

She thought of Teddy. Ninth?

She thought – and hope curled horribly in her chest, rose chokingly in her throat, and she almost flung the bag from her shoulders, jerking desperately at the zipper so it caught and she would have cursed if she dared speak. It had to be there and she didn't know to hope or not because she could never decide, she could never deciding if hoping could make something true or if hoping too strongly destroyed it. Alerted a spiteful universe.

And she got a hold of herself, and calmed, because it was as it was as it was, and as she did this she dumped the pokeballs from her bag so the marble-sized things rolled into the grass and it was as it was as it was she told herself as her hands moved rapidly over the pile, identifying each at a touch, and it was already but Schrodinger's cat – cat she almost laughed except she couldn't open her mouth as she tried to not think, to panic and not panic, wish and accept.

And it was not there.

She looked again, this time hoping desperately, able to hope. Flashes of pokemon passed through her mind – arcanine, golduck, zapdos, bellsprout – and even the other ones of the gray and white pokeballs, and it was not there.

She doubled over, crouching on the ground with her arms pressed tightly into her stomach, wanting to scream. "He has to be here," she whispered instead. "I put him in I put him in even, I mentioned him he has to be with the rest. He has to be here!" she screamed finally. Teddy's warmth was there against her side and she hugged him as she hated herself for resenting that he was the one there.

Time passed. She pushed the pokeballs back into her bag, picking carefully through the grass to make sure she hadn't missed any. She kept wiping at her face. Her cheeks felt cold when she touched them.

She knew she should start walking again, but she stayed where she was when she finished picking the pokeballs up, sitting with her bag in front of her as if she was about to stand again.

Legendaries in pokeballs, she thought dimly. Multiples. Moltres. Ho-oh.

Ho-oh.

Ho-oh.

And she stood and swung her backpack onto her back again.

She remembered her dream. If you could only get back you could fix everything but getting back was fixing, getting back couldn't happen unless you were back. Only, maybe, maybe there was still a way left open from before. And you could be back. And then everything could be fixed.

She was there now. If something wasn't right she could fix it.

Ho-oh.


	6. SURreality: Considering

KJ is Platinum Dragoness'

Jenifer is Daisy Diva's.

* * *

SURreality: Considering

She'd have to wait.

Alison could accept this. That it was possible was enough for her. And it would take her time to figure out how she'd do it anyway.

She had a half-dozen Ho-oh, courtesy of her incessant restarts. Always frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the world, she'd never been one to even pause at the thought of wiping out the existence of her chosen trainer and everyone else. When she thought of it at all, she thought of it as fixing, undoing the damage of unlocked everything, beaten everyone, stagnant nothingness. A minority view, she supposed, judging by fanfic. Well, it had likely helped that she had been able to trade so easily. She hadn't even liked Ho-oh, but she'd collected them all the same.

But in the game, the most Ho-oh's sacred ash was good for was the revival of a team. Fainting, not death.

Although there was no death in the game, and so no way of ever trying, she felt certain it couldn't be stretched further. If there was no death there could be nothing with power over it. It was only within the story and the myths it came from that she could find what she wanted.

Hers were useless. It was the game they came from, the world within. Perhaps if she'd made herself one in a story – but likely something would have gone wrong. This world was in flux. She didn't think it wise to trust in her own will alone. If there was a way of succeeding in the world as it was, trying to force it differently would be a mistake.

The boy's had flown off. But she still had three moltres of her own, had passed them over while she looked through her pokeballs for the only one she truly wanted. Within the story of the game, within the world itself, there was only one, a god of legend. It didn't make sense to think that any trainer who walked in would possess that one.

But this world was flat and fake. There was nothing indigenous to it, just things that appeared as she watched, for her convenience and others. There was only what they brought and considered – a rattata on the path in place of a squirrel, a boy avoiding game trainers. But as she continued, didn't it become real, begin to stretch beyond the bare framework?

A hypothesis, then: Within the world lay a set of legendary pokemon as in the game. As in the various canons. Or they would be there, when the world had come fully into being and was more than grass and friendly forest and a half-made town.

So she'd travel to find that place, or to make that place exist to be found, however it came to work.

Because it didn't matter if this was a dream or not, or if she'd remember when she woke. If she could just do this, that would be enough.

She came to hedges.

They were as tall as she was, neatly trimmed and impossibly thick. The green reached to the very ground, hiding any roots, and there were no holes in the tightly packed, uniform leaves. They were arranged like penguin feathers, she found when she touched them – each leaf pushing straight out so that it was only the tip she saw, layered together to block any view into the inside.

A colossal waste of chlorophyll. She'd never liked hedges anyway. The most boring of all plants, and not even natives.

These were arranged in what she could only assume was a maze. It was ridiculous, impossible.

There was a sudden, momentary temptation. She tolerated these things in the game, they'd never been a source of frustration, Pokemon's puzzles had always been mild enough, and yet...She could pass a small tree with nothing but a just caught rattata, yet she couldn't simply level these absurd, pointless mazes with a charizard? And if not her, surely someone else – whoever the developers in the games were, they clearly never cared about utility, and in a world where six year olds fought with monsters, surely deciding to solve the maze by burning or ripping a path straight through had happened.

And she didn't even like these plants.

But she'd have felt regret afterward, wouldn't she? She cringed for the wrong reasons watching massive fight scenes, where the heroes were tossed through picturesque cliffs and forests, shattered crystal trees, blasted holes in giant statues. It was easier to destroy than create. No, that wasn't it. It was impossible to fix it completely, impossible to ever put the pieces back together as they were.

This place was perfect. She didn't like it, but it was flawless. There was no need to ruin it.

For the moment, Alison thought, she would only watch. Would only observe what happened before her.

So she walked into the maze. She took the dead ends calmly, just backtracking to the last turn, and before long she was through. It hadn't been complex, or long – but then, the games had never been designed to be that hard, had they?

It exited directly into a forest. She smiled to see real plants again and walked in.

There was a clear, distinct path this time, wide enough for a cart. Or a car – who had carts these days? It was trampled dirt, yet unbelievably, dirt, with the flat tops of a few stones poking out. Like a...well, like she pictured the path between peasant villages in the short time, or fairy tale time, when they were small outposts dwarfed by the land around them, before the sheer numbers had devoured the forests and land. Before the path would have been worn away to bare stones that twisted malevolently underfoot.

The path was straight. She walked along, Teddy padding at her heels. There was a turn and she stepped to go around it.

And almost ran into a boy.

She jumped, startled. He was only a foot or so away from her and she hadn't seen anyone, hadn't been expecting to see anyone.

"Let's have a battle," the boy announced. He was about as tall as she was, a teen. She couldn't really guess his age beyond that – she'd always been awful at that. Of course people had been just as awful at guessing her age, so maybe no one was any good at it.

"I-" she started to say, but the boy had released a pokemon. He didn't seem to have been waiting for a response, or even notice she had tried to give one. A growlithe appeared. It stood facing her, silent and almost unmoving, just its breathing showing it to be alive. More than a toy or a static image on a gameboy screen. Behind her Teddy growled, the sound dying in his throat.

She turned to him and reached out to pet his shoulder. The fearful growl built up again as she did so and she loved him suddenly for it, for how he could be comforted by a small thing, for how she knew he would never hurt her in his fright. She rubbed his neck and he growled, the muscles under his skin tensed to steel.

"I don't want to fight," she said, looking at the boy.

"You can't refused a trainer battle," the boy said, staring straight ahead. She realized suddenly his outfit was odd, matched red shirt and pants with a white line running through both, the design looking like some kind of sportswear, but cut almost like a suit.

Under her hand Teddy growled in terror. She had to deal with this.

Could she even battle, with another pokemon out? Yellow, Yellow, she thought. You could have a pokemon trailing you in Yellow. She reached into her bag, feeling the tiny pokeballs running about like marbles. She closed her hand on one – Feraligator. She'd raised it to evolution, no further. She'd never really liked water pokemon for some reason. She thought it all went back to the animation on her Blue version, the pathetic few droplets that comprised water gun. Compared to ember or even leech seed, it was just so unimpressive. Or maybe the way so few water pokemon could be acquired early in the game, so that her team was finished by the time they were a real option.

The feraligator faced the growlithe. It – he, she'd have remembered if she'd gotten a girl after the way the gender ratio was skewed on starters – didn't turn around to look at her. She was viewing its back, the growlithe off to the side facing her.

"Bite," said the boy in the red outfit.

She didn't remember what the moves of a feraligator was, but she knew the basic ones. "Water gun," she said.

The feraligator reacted first. She assumed it would have better speed, was at a higher level. It opened its jaws and a thick jet of water shot out into the growlithe. The water splattered as it hit in all directions, seeming to vanish into a fine spray. It looked like it had on the show. It didn't look right, Alison thought, like the attack was simply disappearing. The ground directly under the growlithe's forepaws darkened, damp. Beyond that, the water seemed like it had no affect on the surroundings. The growlithe didn't react either. It just stood there.

The feraligator stopped. The growlithe collapsed a second later, bonelessly. The boy held out the pokeball and recalled it, his arm dropping back to his side.

"Wow," he said. "You're a great trainer to be able to beat me."

She recalled the still feraligator. Teddy quieted.

She went past him, started to walk away. He didn't move. She looked over her shoulder, feeling nervous now with him just standing there, with her back turned, and he didn't move. She sped up, then sped up again.

These the dead boy had spoken so lightly of?

The path faded under her feet as she continued. She might have stepped off it as some point without realizing, because presently she found herself walking between trees, around bushes and under branches. Shortly she found herself on another plain.

She might have wondered if she'd ended up at the beginning again, or if the world had reverted (she'd failed some test) but the grass here was almost meadow. She was still going forward. Inward, she thought, although truthfully she didn't know if she was going toward a more real world, or if the world became more real the longer she walked in it.

She walked, and Teddy followed, still making faint sounds of anxiety in his chest at first, and presently the ground dropped out from the edge of the world.

Alison wasn't quite sure what to make of it until she got closer. Coming to the edge she saw a collection of buildings resting in the area below. The slope down was steep and regular, like it was drawn. The grass there was faintly scraggly, the ground itself made of larger grain. It was unnatural but it struck her as another fragment of realness. It was landscaped, like how things had looked between the forest and houses in places back in the world before. She'd climbed up and down them a hundred times when she was younger.

She turned to Teddy. "You remember too, right?" she asked him, not so much to talk to him as if he could understand as that it suddenly occurred to her that he might not. He'd been with her some of the times, but it was years ago. He looked back at her complacently now, perhaps faintly puzzled.

She walked down turned slightly sideways but at a steady, quick pace. At the bottom, she began to examine the builds before her.

They were smaller this time, not warehouse-sized like the first couple she'd seen in the first town, and more regular in structure. The first two had no doors, only windows, and looked almost as if they had been poured from a mold. Past them was a large circular court made of white stones, and standing there was a collection of people. Girls, again.

She hesitated a second at the sight of people, but then, it was a dream and she wanted to see all of it.

"Hey, another one!" greeted the nearest as she approached, a girl about her height with reddish cinnamon hair. "Who are you?"

"I'm – um..." Alison's mind stalled. Online she never used her name, offline she never used her penname. Which situation was this? "I'm Alison," she said, picking the name that wouldn't have meaning.

By all appearances, the other girl didn't notice her hesitation. "I'm KJ! That's a cool persian. I've got one myself, Pretty Kitty. You gave yourself it?"

Alison shook her head. The only thing like that she hadn't gotten. "I just ended up with him."

The girl paused. "Oh so...you're another gameplayer?" She sounded faintly dismissive.

"I'm a writer," Alison said without thinking.

"Oh, okay!" She sounded relieved. "I ran into a couple earlier, they wanted me to just _fight_ with them, it was so stupid." She looked over Alison. "You were a realist? We've had a couple of them. Personally I never understood the appeal..." The way the girl spoke was faintly strange, a sort of unsubstantiability to it, and Alison thought of the occasional tendency, more pronounced online, to coin new words on the spot.

"No," Alison said, thinking she understood. "I wrote, but I didn't write what I wanted. So this is just me. My cat. The ones I have with me are the ones I did raise, in the games. I wrote-" And she thought better of it and stopped. "It doesn't matter."

The girl laughed agreeably, a faint uncomfortableness to it, probably not sure what to make of Alison's response. "Yeah, I know what you mean. Everything's still changing. Joanne started off with bright purple hair, but now it's blue. And I decided I didn't like having freckles after all. They're okay when you're writing about them, but they're too kiddie when you're actually looking at them. It works for people like you, too. Jenifer started off twelve, with dirty blonde hair, and now, well, that's her over there," she said, pointing to a girl nearly six feet tall, with the body of an adult and hair literally the color of a changing rainbow.

Alison remembered the girl she'd seen, with the purple eyes.

Everything was still changing...

She wondered.

Everything?


	7. SURreality: Changing

The italicized line is from White Rain, which is a short doujinshi by Yoshitoshi ABe. It is not commercially available but a translated version can be downloaded from various internet sites. I highly recommend it.

SURreality: Changing

-

Everything was still changing.

Alison had been thinking of progression, of secession, of the way the grass had changed under her feet as she walked. Of things moving in one direction, creeping slowly to reality.

And it was possible, she thought, that they'd be stuck like that – one change and it's done. Or progressively smaller changes, like a pendulum's slowing swings.

But no, it seemed they could change back and forth, without obvious limits or the rules she'd first thought would be in place.

(That girl with the purple eyes?)

The changes were so drastic. Completely overwriting their own appearance. (Did people hate themselves so much?) An order of magnitude beyond small changes in the composition of plants.

Could she – no, she thought sharply, feeling a flash of fear. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life looking at a half stranger in a mirror, and she didn't know if she'd be able to put it back.

Although...she rubbed her left wrist thoughtfully, feeling the ribbed skin, then looked at it. The two halves of the scar thickened and lengthened until they merged, the color changing from tan peach to mottled white. She examined the difference, turning her wrist from side to side.

She smiled. That was a lot easier than putting it back some other way. She rubbed her thumb over it again and then dropped her arms to her sides and continued on.

So then. She had the same kind of abilities as the other girls, and presumably to the same degree. Consensus reality, then? But the ground...she didn't think they would have thought of it. Their idea of perfect was probably those empty green wastelands they poured lakes over to make grow and mowed twice daily to keep short. People wanted grass, not flowers. This was what she wanted.

(That girl, the one with purple eyes?)

So was she controlling the world? She was dreaming, but that didn't mean anything.

They probably didn't notice. The ones she'd seen had grouped together in stone courtyards and thought about if freckles were cute or childish.

(The girl with purple eyes)

So she was the one thinking about that bit of the world. What if someone else was? She thought of the landscaped gradient, the grass. Had it been like that because that was what she remembered, thin grass reaching to the treeline, or because someone in the town had thought there should be plain grass over the ground?

Then the girl's eyes had been purple, it hadn't been a trick of the light or her own inattention. And she'd thought they couldn't be (because they couldn't, she thought peevishly, purple was caused by having such low levels of blue pigments that the red blood vessels could be seen through it, and that meant blindness), and that the closest was blue so dark it verged on purple, and then that's what it had been, just like she'd thought.

What were the rules then? Her reality overrode theirs? That happened in dreams.

Could their reality override hers?

That happened in dreams too. Willing and wishing something only to have it stubbornly twist back to the way it was or worse, because dark overrode light and fear overrode joy, and if you made the mistake of doubt, thought for a moment what if it doesn't – then it was so.

So she wouldn't doubt, then.

It was a ridiculous solution. When in dreams, dream? She knew she could make it so. And so she had no need to doubt.

Dark overrode light.

But she was never trying to make something perfect. Entropy. To increase complexity was to break apart that around you. To improve something you took from something else, and lost pieces in the transition.

She accepted that. (_You have accepted me, which is fundamentally evil_) Better to light a candle, even if it only ended with white turned to smoke and ash.


End file.
